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Cavium has two more tilts at Arm servers as Nvidia offers Arm-bots

HPC types offered density, carriers get roll-your-own customer-premises kit

Cavium’s made two new attempts to find an audience for Arm-powered servers.

The first comes from Gigabyte in the form of the new H261 “Density Optimized Server platforms”. The product offers a 2U platform packing up to four dual-socket servers, each housing a pair of ThunderX2 CPUs. As that silicon can reach 32 cores per socket, there’s the chance for 84 servers and 5,376 physical cores in a standard 42U rack.

Gigabyte’s designed the H261 with modest storage – just half a dozen 2.5” disks or three 3.5 disks per node – and done so intentionally to target workloads that don’t need bulk storage. High-performance computing is squarely in Gigabyte and Cavium’s sights: the pair have seen HPE’s Arm-powered Apollo 70 product and figure that some buyers would rather deal with original design manufacturers rather than sign up for the complexities of a relationship with a tier one vendor.

The ThunderX2 was designed with HPC workloads in mind. No wonder Cavium execs told The Register they feel company has general purpose servers covered but that the new Gigabyte kit means they can now cover workloads that require density.

And do so without compromise: there’s PCIe and other expansion options to allow addition of GPUs.

Cavium’s other new toy is all its own: the “OCTEON TX” is am Armv8 system on a chip designed for customer premises equipment.

Built on first-generation Thunder cores, the two-to-24-core devices are offered as engines to run virtual network functions. Cavium hopes vendors that built appliances on its silicon will see the potential to re-package those functions as functions, then work with carriers and service providers to distribute them to customer-premises equipment. The SoCs can run Linux, Docker or Mesosphere, making it easy for service providers to package network functions.

Cavium and Gigabyte made their announcements at Taiwan’s Computex show, where Nvidia also revealed Arm-powered kit in the form of “Isaac … a new platform to power the next generation of autonomous machines, bringing artificial intelligence capabilities to robots”.

Isaac is a platform and inside you’ll find half a dozen different processors, including “Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core Arm64 CPU, dual NVDLA deep learning accelerators, an image processor, a vision processor and a video processor.”

A Jetson Xavier developers kit will go on sale at US$1,299 in August 2018. Gigabyte’s H261 will debut in Q3. OCTEON TX is in production now. ®

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